


Heaven Knows We'll Soon Be Dust

by akisazame



Category: Persona 4
Genre: Gen, Prison Visit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-06
Updated: 2015-02-06
Packaged: 2018-03-10 20:40:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3302771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akisazame/pseuds/akisazame
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Who the fuck is Mariko Kusumi?"</p>
<p>"Don't ask me, she's the one who wants to see your sorry ass."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Heaven Knows We'll Soon Be Dust

"You have a new visitation request."

Adachi looked up from where he sat on the floor of his cell, back against the cold concrete wall. He eyed the guard with mild interest. "Dojima-san just visited last week."

"I said a _new_ visitation request," the guard spit out, holding the sheet of paper between his thumb and forefinger as though it would spontaneously combust. "Detective Dojima has a standing order. You'll have to approve this one."

There were very few people who would even consider visiting Adachi, at least in his opinion. Seta was an option, of course, but he was back in some city somewhere after his fucked up Golden Week visit. Speaking of, that Sho kid could also have been interested, except he probably hated Adachi's guts after the stupid shit he pulled. Then again, maybe that was why he wanted to visit; he couldn't kick the shit out of Adachi with the bulletproof glass between them, but the kid had a big mouth, just like all of Seta's friends. Honestly, any of Seta's friends could have been stupid enough to want to come visit him; maybe they had some misguided sense of camaraderie after that business with the Persona fragments or whatever the fuck it was that Minazuki had been doing. Adachi finally pulled himself to his feet and crossed the cell to pluck the paper from the guard's fingers.

"Who the fuck is Mariko Kusumi?"

"Don't ask me, she's the one who wants to see your sorry ass," the guard said, and Adachi might've snapped something back if he wasn't still a little on-edge after getting thrown into a TV by a possessed policeman. The guard tapped a ballpoint pen against the cell's bars in an ugly staccato rhythm. "Just check yes or no and sign it, alright?"

Adachi spent another minute staring at the unfamiliar name on the request form before taking the proffered pen. "This isn't a contract, right?" he said slowly, peering at the guard out of the corner of his eye. "I can still change my mind."

"Wouldn't be very nice," the guard replied, his tone impatient, "but you don't have to show up if you don't want to."

"I'm not known for being nice," Adachi said as he checked the box next to 'yes.'

The visit was scheduled for the following Thursday at 2 in the afternoon, arranged without any input on Adachi's part. Prisoners didn't get any say as to when their visitors showed up; they approved each individual visitor, and apparently they could not show up if they so chose, but that was the extent of their agency. When the day arrived, Adachi had convinced himself that he wasn't going to go after all; he didn't even know who this lady was, despite a week and a half of racking his brain. He didn't owe a stranger anything, and he'd been stupid to even agree to see her in the first place. At least getting stood up would probably keep her from trying again.

He spent most of the morning lying on his back on the futon, staring listlessly at the sunlight patterns as they moved across the ceiling. He thought about the electromagnetic spectrum, physics classes in college, quantum mechanics. Planck's constant, the quantum of action. The energy of a photon is proportional to its frequency.

The guard who came to fetch him was the same self-important asshole who'd brought him the visitation request. "C'mon, your guest is already waiting." Adachi was prepared to say no, but something about the word 'guest' made his brain itch, and the lackadaisical speech he'd prepared scattered before the words could reach his mouth.

She was already sitting on the other side of the glass when the guard led Adachi in. She was wearing a wide-brimmed sunhat and a pair of sunglasses that seemed entirely too large for her face, and she was staring down at her nails almost thoughtfully, an emery board in one hand. Adachi was instantly annoyed; he'd been hoping that he'd be able to recognize her face, but clearly she was being intentionally coy. Even her nonchalant posture made his skin boil. He regretted doing this, regretted agreeing to meet with this mystery woman, regretted the moments of weakness that convinced him this was an acceptable course of action, but the guard was already out the door to wait on the other side of the one-way-glass behind him.

He sat in the chair and stared at her for a few moments. It didn't even seem like she'd noticed him come in. "Did you request visitation just so a strange criminal could watch you do your nails?"

The woman looked up, startled into nearly dropping her emery board. She recovered quickly, though, and took off her sunglasses to reveal narrowed grey-green eyes. She looked younger than Adachi had expected. "No. Don't be stupid."

"Then you came here to sass a stranger," Adachi said, leaning back in his chair and rolling his eyes.

"Not a stranger," she shot back, pointing the emery board at him and scowling. "You don't remember me at all, do you?"

"You meet a lot of people in my line of work." Adachi folded his hands behind his head, already growing weary of this line of conversation. "Former line of work, I suppose. So what'd I do, help you get your cat out of a tree? Track down your missing purse?"

The woman's eyes flashed, dark and angry. "I made you what you are," she said, and the change in her tone made Adachi jump; her voice was deeper and somehow resonant in the small room. "What you _were._ I gave you a gift, and you used it and threw it away." Adachi could swear the room had gotten darker, and the woman's face looked somehow different, familiar in a way that his memory couldn't place. "The first one chosen, the second to fall. What a pity. What a waste."

It came to him in a flash -- that face had been the first to greet him when he came to Inaba, had smiled at him as she shook his hand, had haunted his dreams for months until Seta and his friends had put an end to it all. He hadn't had the dreams since he'd been arrested. Something about her nagged at him, though, an uncomfortable twitch in his mind. It felt like deja vu, or some kind of double vision, an image superimposed on what his eyes were seeing. "Was it you?" he asked, his voice sounding small to his own ears. "It couldn't have... she was..."

The light returned to the room, as though emerging from behind a cloud. Maybe that's all it had been. "She said you were smarter than you let on," the woman said with a smirk; she leaned down to slip the emery board into the bag at her feet, and the sunhat tipped down to shade her eyes. Her voice was back to normal, brighter and younger with an edge of cynicism. "She was right. Sometimes she was right."

"Cut the cryptic bullshit," Adachi snapped, though it didn't come out with as much sharpness as he intended. "Is this some kind of split personality thing? Who the fuck are you, really?"

"Do you _actually_ want to know who I am?" She leaned towards the glass until the brim of her sunhat was pressed against it. "Because that could take a while. I've been known by a lot of names. You could say I'm kind of a big deal. But," she went on, talking right through Adachi's attempt to impatiently interject, "you can call me Mariko. Or Marie, if you'd prefer."

Adachi considered the options presented; truthfully, neither name fit the visions that had haunted his dreams for months, but this woman -- this girl, really -- didn't fit those visions either. He'd never known that woman's name. "Marie, then," he said slowly, feeling it out on his tongue. He paused for a moment, phrasing and rephrasing his next question in his head. "Are you really her?"

The question alone didn't make sense, but she seemed to understand exactly what he'd meant by it. "I am now. For a while, I wasn't. For a while, I didn't know who I was. I know better now, and I _know_ better now."

There was a twinge behind Adachi's eye. He couldn't stand the way Marie talked in riddles and roundabouts, even if that made him a hypocrite. He was used to being a hypocrite. "You still haven't answered my first question," he said, pressing his palm to his offending eye. "Why did you want to see me? I'm just some shitty murderer."

"Well, that's..." She trailed off and looked away, the first sign of hesitance she'd shown in their strange conversation. "Look, it's complicated, okay? I just kind of felt like I should visit you, so I decided to visit you! You don't have to read anything into it."

"So you felt like it," Adachi said, pronouncing each word slowly, like he was speaking to an insolent child. He was getting really sick of talking to insolent children. "You requested a visit, came all the way down here, took precious time out of my day, because you _felt_ like it."

" _Look,_ " she snapped, jumping to her feet and glaring at him, grey-green eyes flashing angrily. Adachi could've sworn he heard a clap of thunder in the distance, but dismissed the notion immediately. "Look," she said again, shrinking back down into the chair, deflated, "it's not like I feel responsible for you or anything. That thing she... I... _we_ did, it wasn't like it was a geas. You acted of your own free will, such as it is. But at the same time..." She paused, closed her mouth, opened it, closed it again. "I don't know how to explain it. We didn't make you do anything, but you're here because of us. So I guess maybe I do feel responsible. A little bit."

Adachi sighed, long and low. His eye throbbed. "So you're here for yourself. To do some fucking community service. To feed your ego."

"Maybe to feed yours," she countered. "Not that you need it, from what I've heard."

At that Adachi slowly straightened in the chair, truly intrigued for the first time all afternoon. He assumed that he was no longer a subject of the outside world's casual gossip, which narrowed down his options dramatically. "And where might you have heard that?"

Marie seemed to realize her mistake, blinking several times and then glancing away, eyes rooted to the floor. "Around," she murmured indistinctly. "From people. Friends."

Adachi pursed his lips to keep from grinning. "From Seta?"

She very nearly jumped in her chair. Adachi caught the laugh in his throat and swallowed it back down. Marie was staring at him now, eyes wide and flashing with annoyance. "No!" she shouted, voice strained. "Why would I... no! Stop making assumptions. Stupid stuck-up jerk."

"How is Seta?" Adachi said, leaning in further, unable to keep the smile off his face. "Doing well in the city, I trust? Still top of the class?"

"Why would I know that?! It's not like I..." She trailed off, then narrowed her eyes again, the same judgemental expression she'd had when she first looked at him. "You're making fun of me, aren't you?"

The smile was on Adachi's face in full force now. He rested an elbow on the ledge in front of him, then set his chin in his hand. "What can I say? Sometimes I like to go for the low-hanging fruit."

He had clearly gotten too close for Marie's comfort, even with the glass between them, and she pushed the folding chair back, metal scraping angrily against the laminate floor. "This was stupid. You're stupid."

The snappy retort was on the tip of his tongue, an 'I've been called worse' or a 'takes one to know one,' but the stern knock from the other side of the one-way-glass derailed that train of thought entirely. He glanced back over his shoulder to roll his eyes at the guard he couldn't see. "They're gonna make you leave soon, you know," he said, pushing his chair back away from the glass. "I hope this little visit was worth your time."

"Hey!" Marie exclaimed, jumping to her feet and putting her hands on her hips. Adachi froze in place and cocked an eyebrow; Marie nodded, her expression softening now that she'd recaptured Adachi's attention. Her left hand dropped to her side, while the right drifted across her stomach to grab her left wrist, an uncertain, nervous gesture. "Hey..." she said again, quiet and thoughtful, "thanks for, you know, helping him or whatever. She... _we_ kind of messed things up a lot." She chewed the corner of her bottom lip, then looked directly into Adachi's eyes, her gaze just as piercing as the one he'd seen in his dreams, but softer around the edges. "You could've been a pretty good guy, you know? If you'd wanted."

Something gnawed at Adachi's chest, the irritating remnants of the sorts of emotions with which he didn't like to actively associate. He pushed whatever it was out through his mouth in a strange wheezing laugh and waved his hand dismissively. "Being the good guy is boring. She'd tell you that too, wouldn't she?"

Marie shrugged noncommittally. "I guess. I kind of like boring, though." There was another knock at the window behind Adachi, this one loud enough for Marie to notice, her eyes flickering to the blank pane of glass before returning to Adachi's face. Then, inexplicably, she smiled, and the gesture lit up her entire face, like the sun emerging from behind a cloud. "Maybe I'll come back sometime?"

"That would be--" _nice._ He stopped himself before he said it. It was impossible to bluff once you'd put all your cards on the table. He hadn't even considered any of this 'nice' until the word had almost tumbled out of his mouth; he'd been disarmed and he hated it. "What happened to 'you're stupid'?"

She made a disgusted sound and rolled her eyes emphatically. "Margaret was right. You've would've made a _terrible_ guest."

There was that word again, and this time it sparked, drawing indistinct blue dream-memories to Adachi's mind. Those dreams had always been interrupted by grey-white ripples and insistent red eyes. He'd forgotten all about the blue until now. "What are you..."

The door behind Adachi slammed open and he glanced behind him to see the guard barging in impatiently; when he looked back, Marie had spun on one boot heel, bag in her hand, sunglasses placed over her eyes like a mask. She flashed her sunshine smile over her shoulder so fast that Adachi almost missed it. "Be seeing you," she said, and it sounded like a threat.

She disappeared through the far door just as the asshole guard shoved Adachi's shoulder from behind, snapping the fragile thread of whatever incomprehensible emotion Adachi was feeling in Marie's wake. "Fuckin' waste, cute girl like that coming to see a fool like you."

_Fool._ Another itch and a flash of blue. Adachi shook his head and gave the guard a beatific smile. "What can I say? I'm a charmer."

The guard gripped Adachi's elbow and pulled him roughly to his feet. "Charm your way back into your cell. You sure as hell aren't charming your way out."

The cell was just the same as Adachi had left it except for the sunlight on the ceiling, shifted a few degrees from where it had been before. He threw himself down on the futon again and stared up at the light and shadows. Quantum mechanics. Planck's constant. The electromagnetic spectrum. 470 nanometres, the wavelength of pure blue light.


End file.
